Community News

Monday, February 11, 2013

Financial co-operatives making a difference half a world away

There are more than half a
million credit union members in Manitoba. Most join for familiar reasons: they
prefer the great rates, friendly, personal service and highly competitive
products credit unions have to offer.

Half a world away, however,
many thousands more are joining credit unions for a much more basic reason:
because belonging to a financial co-operative gives them the opportunity to
escape poverty and achieve successes they would otherwise never know.

In countries like Uganda,
fledgling Savings and Co-operative Credit Organizations, or SACCOs, often with
the support of the Canadian Co-operative Association — and, by extension,
credit union members like yourself — are making a dramatic difference in the
lives of their members.

People like Boniface Ayo, one
of the founding members of Ikwera SACCO in Aduku, a town in the Central Ugandan
district of Apac. Ayo, a farmer with five children aged two to 18, said that
like many members of the SACCO, he joined to get access to money to pay school
fees.

"Money is the source of
everything. With it, you can send your children to school," Ayo said.
"If there is poverty, if there is nothing in your pocket, then there is
nothing."

The Ugandan school system
consists of government-run schools and private schools. The government-run
schools are more affordable, but class sizes can be as large as 500 students
for one teacher. Private schools offer more reasonable class sizes and higher
quality education, but they're also costlier, out of the reach of many rural
Ugandans.

Through school-fee loans from
SACCOs, however, many Ugandans are beginning to be able to send their children
to private school.

For parents like Ayo, that
means the opportunity to see his children reach their full potential.

“I would like to struggle very
hard so they each can go to school and reach the level they can reach," he
said.